Constructive Criticism

Dear Puddles,

Do you ever wonder what would happen if we still got report cards as adults, with written evaluations of our performance, internal and external, as humans, written by all of the people in our lives and ourselves? Let’s take a moment to think about it.

My mom showed me a few report cards she had saved from the early years of elementary school. To my surprised, the -- School District in 2000 required teachers to not only grade their students on an A-F scale (Math, Reading, Writing, Social Studies, Science?) and an O-A scale (Outstanding, Satisfactory, Needs Improvement for Art, Music, and PE) and a check or plus (for AT?), but also a write a short statement about each their overall performance in that marking period?

It was jarring. I can’t recall much from elementary school, but I imagined that my report cards were awash in As, Os, and pluses, generic praise of my academic performance (Muddles is doing well in all her subjects. Keep up the good work!). That was not the case. There were a fair number of the expected, but did you know that in the second grade in Marking Period 3 that I got a B+ in social studies? Neither did I. Did you know that in Marking Period 2, Ms. – said that I was a good student, but should focus more on my work? That I was shooting straight A minuses in reading comprehension in the third grade, and that the AT teacher gave my work habits all pluses and my actual reasoning abilities mere checks? That my art teacher put a definitive “S” every marking period in the fourth grade?

At this point, save extremely effective hypnosis, I’ll never quite be able to know both what it felt like to be me. Because the truth is, I always assumed that as a student, I was better than my peers and reading and writing and art. I never thought I had any trouble focusing. (Seriously, what else could my little second grade brain have been preoccupied with?) I thought my troubles remembering the details of the United States legislative branch were recent. As were my issues with “ideational flexibility.” And while I remember being a happy, gregarious, solidly above-average little pupil, I clearly could not have been, all the time. My struggles with social studies must have been devastating. I must have felt jealous of all the other kids more apt at solving logic matrices than I was.

In fact, I know with complete certainty that in middle school I bristled at the teacher calling the kid who sat next to me “a hidden talent” when it was I, I, who was the actual in-house artist of the period 7 sixth grade art classes, of course. I was pretty sure that was the consensus arrived upon by the class. Ian’s drawings were meticulously detailed, but always of the same type; Sierra was good, but her reputation as a tough girl with a chip on her shoulder far outshadowed her reputation as an artist; Anissa ocassionally produced something good too, but in the way that girls who know and are good at being pretty can use the same tricks in their art.

See what a judgmental, desperate middle schooler I was? I distinctly remember thinking all of those things, and still holding this image in my mind of myself as this virtuous cheerful kid who generally just didn’t have the sort of flaws that were ever really noticed by anyone.

Needless to say, it’s hard to maintain that illusion when you’re confronted by direct evidence that someone spent some time thining about you, and thinking about you in relation to your peers. Direct feedback, with some constructive criticism, served hot like a disinfectant and also a bowl of plain oatmeal. They thought about how quick, how friendly, how focused, how adept at a million different things you were, and then tried to convey them to you. Because it was their job, their responsibility, to tell you how to improve yourself.

By the end of a school career, this practice of individual, holistic feedback and suggestions for improvement are out of the scope of instructors. They’re to instruct, evaluate, and the onus is largely transferred increasingly onto the student to figure out how to improve from how they fare on evaluations. But, as we age out of school, even this disappears. Evaluations happen once a year, in a professional setting, and are usually, in my experience, so fraught with ramifications about someone’s financial security and professional future that they are hardly ever as broad or as precise or as useful as anything our fourth grade teachers would have given us. And of course, there are our spouses and partners and friends and family. But do they give us feedback with the clarity and consistency of elementary school report cards? Or are those exchanges a murky quagmire of eggshell dances and hidden offenses, habitually delayed until simmering resentments overflow?

It’s not that people are paying less attention to us – I think it’s just that they, and we, feel less that we can or should critique the people we’re close to. In strange contrast, I think we may be giving feedback to our institutions more and more, perhaps just because they solicit it, because there are very measurable ways (profit?) in which they can make gains when they change themselves to better serve their consumers. We’re therefore encouraged and empowered to be feedback-givers to these institutions. But not to each other, or at least, not with anything near the consistency of marking period, even though, of course, I think we stand to improve our own experiences with others and ourselves as a result.

So, I guess the obvious question is why not, and the obvious answer is that it. Is. Just. So. awkward. But, maybe another less impactful reason it is something that just doesn’t really occur to us to solicit, or give. We all have our judgments of each other, but it seems like such a leap to think critically about them, transform them into constructive feedback, and then actually deliver them. There’s also this naïve hope that the person will realize it themselves. The fear that they’ve already been told this, have decided not to change, or are trying to change and have failed, and that any additional criticism would simply be painful and serve to strain the relationship. And I don’t know that there’s any way to get around this, other than to consider this as a possibility. For me, the experience of seeing my name and an evaluation of my behavior and abilities written down was enormously useful in just understanding my place then, and what I feel I should be more uncertain about now. The image of myself was crafted based on how it felt to be me, and to a lesser extent, feedback I got from my environment – that, as evidenced above, was clearly so warped by the former. I felt like it was the metaphysical equivalent of someone handing you a candid polaroid they took of you. And you get to just stare at it for a while, internalize it, study, wonder why you hold your head that way or why you use that weird affectation in your speech. And how, how on earth you could have been so feeling-blind to it.

And I guess that just comes back to this persistent problem that I have, that I wonder if other people will begin to have more and more too, as they spend more time alone, more time in their head, and less time having to see themselves through the eyes of other people. This feeling of the self as just this abstract cloud of consciousness, rather than something that has a physical manifestation and presence and emits words and behaviors that are felt by another swirl of consciousness. And if we can get coached on how to throw with accuracy, how to keep our backs straight in downward dogs and how to catch car keys that are thrown at us – why can’t we occasionally admit that we need help seeing our whole person, that we can’t see our own flaws and could someone please, in the gentlest way possible, point them out to us and tell us how other people are doing it differently and better?

Constructive Criticism

Dear Puddles, 

Do you ever wonder what would happen if we still got report cards as adults, with written evaluations of our performance, internal and external, as humans, written by all of the people in our lives and ourselves? Let’s take a moment to think about it.

My mom showed me a few report cards she had saved from the early years of elementary school. To my surprised, the -- School District in 2000 required teachers to not only grade their students on an A-F scale (Math, Reading, Writing, Social Studies, Science?) and an O-A scale (Outstanding, Satisfactory, Needs Improvement for Art, Music, and PE) and a check or plus (for AT?), but also a write a short statement about each their overall performance in that marking period?

It was jarring. I can’t recall much from elementary school, but I imagined that my report cards were awash in As, Os, and pluses, generic praise of my academic performance (Muddles is doing well in all her subjects. Keep up the good work!). That was not the case. There were a fair number of the expected, but did you know that in the second grade in Marking Period 3 that I got a B+ in social studies? Neither did I. Did you know that in Marking Period 2, Ms. – said that I was a good student, but should focus more on my work? That I was shooting straight A minuses in reading comprehension in the third grade, and that the AT teacher gave my work habits all pluses and my actual reasoning abilities mere checks? That my art teacher put a definitive “S” every marking period in the fourth grade?

At this point, save extremely effective hypnosis, I’ll never quite be able to know both what it felt like to be me. Because the truth is, I always assumed that as a student, I was better than my peers and reading and writing and art. I never thought I had any trouble focusing. (Seriously, what else could my little second grade brain have been preoccupied with?) I thought my troubles remembering the details of the United States legislative branch were recent. As were my issues with “ideational flexibility.” And while I remember being a happy, gregarious, solidly above-average little pupil, I clearly could not have been, all the time. My struggles with social studies must have been devastating. I must have felt jealous of all the other kids more apt at solving logic matrices than I was.

In fact, I know with complete certainty that in middle school I bristled at the teacher calling the kid who sat next to me “a hidden talent” when it was I, I, who was the actual in-house artist of the period 7 sixth grade art classes, of course. I was pretty sure that was the consensus arrived upon by the class. Ian’s drawings were meticulously detailed, but always of the same type; Sierra was good, but her reputation as a tough girl with a chip on her shoulder far outshadowed her reputation as an artist; Anissa ocassionally produced something good too, but in the way that girls who know and are good at being pretty can use the same tricks in their art.

See what a judgmental, desperate middle schooler I was? I distinctly remember thinking all of those things, and still holding this image in my mind of myself as this virtuous cheerful kid who generally just didn’t have the sort of flaws that were ever really noticed by anyone. 

Needless to say, it’s hard to maintain that illusion when you’re confronted by direct evidence that someone spent some time thining about you, and thinking about you in relation to your peers. Direct feedback, with some constructive criticism, served hot like a disinfectant and also a bowl of plain oatmeal. They thought about how quick, how friendly, how focused, how adept at a million different things you were, and then tried to convey them to you. Because it was their job, their responsibility, to tell you how to improve yourself.

By the end of a school career, this practice of individual, holistic feedback and suggestions for improvement are out of the scope of instructors. They’re to instruct, evaluate, and the onus is largely transferred increasingly onto the student to figure out how to improve from how they fare on evaluations. But, as we age out of school, even this disappears. Evaluations happen once a year, in a professional setting, and are usually, in my experience, so fraught with ramifications about someone’s financial security and professional future that they are hardly ever as broad or as precise or as useful as anything our fourth grade teachers would have given us. And of course, there are our spouses and partners and friends and family. But do they give us feedback with the clarity and consistency of elementary school report cards? Or are those exchanges a murky quagmire of eggshell dances and hidden offenses, habitually delayed until simmering resentments overflow?

It’s not that people are paying less attention to us – I think it’s just that they, and we, feel less that we can or should critique the people we’re close to. In strange contrast, I think we may be giving feedback to our institutions more and more, perhaps just because they solicit it, because there are very measurable ways (profit?) in which they can make gains when they change themselves to better serve their consumers. We’re therefore encouraged and empowered to be feedback-givers to these institutions. But not to each other, or at least, not with anything near the consistency of marking period, even though, of course, I think we stand to improve our own experiences with others and ourselves as a result. 

So, I guess the obvious question is why not, and the obvious answer is that it. Is. Just. So. awkward. But, maybe another less impactful reason it is something that just doesn’t really occur to us to solicit, or give. We all have our judgments of each other, but it seems like such a leap to think critically about them, transform them into constructive feedback, and then actually deliver them. There’s also this naïve hope that the person will realize it themselves. The fear that they’ve already been told this, have decided not to change, or are trying to change and have failed, and that any additional criticism would simply be painful and serve to strain the relationship. And I don’t know that there’s any way to get around this, other than to consider this as a possibility. For me, the experience of seeing my name and an evaluation of my behavior and abilities written down was enormously useful in just understanding my place then, and what I feel I should be more uncertain about now. The image of myself was crafted based on how it felt to be me, and to a lesser extent, feedback I got from my environment – that, as evidenced above, was clearly so warped by the former. I felt like it was the metaphysical equivalent of someone handing you a candid polaroid they took of you. And you get to just stare at it for a while, internalize it, study, wonder why you hold your head that way or why you use that weird affectation in your speech. And how, how on earth you could have been so feeling-blind to it.

And I guess that just comes back to this persistent problem that I have, that I wonder if other people will begin to have more and more too, as they spend more time alone, more time in their head, and less time having to see themselves through the eyes of other people. This feeling of the self as just this abstract cloud of consciousness, rather than something that has a physical manifestation and presence and emits words and behaviors that are felt by another swirl of consciousness. And if we can get coached on how to throw with accuracy, how to keep our backs straight in downward dogs and how to catch car keys that are thrown at us – why can’t we occasionally admit that we need help seeing our whole person, that we can’t see our own flaws and could someone please, in the gentlest way possible, point them out to us and tell us how other people are doing it differently and better?